The English Village as a Literary Trope

In this section, I will analyse the ways in which Badger’s Drift is composed as a literary trope of English villages. This can be understood as an assertion of Santesso’s observation of eighteenth-century poetry which saw a need to create a sentimental reaction in a broad range of readers and “led to a literary tradition of using familiar tropes” (Santesso 21).

Similarly, Badger’s Drift contains numerous stereotypes that are easily identifiable by the audience and construct the village as a trope. I would argue that they are also an example of Jameson’s pastiche as these stereotypes are void of commentary or criticism, and they are signifiers detached from any signified, thereby these stereotypes are transformed into a mythologised image of a village community. I will firstly explore how the novel establishes an imagined community with the illocutionary force of defining all English villages with this same image of community. Then I will highlight the use of superstition to associate village-ness with a sense of connectedvillage-ness to nature. Lastly, I will analyse descriptions of the physical appearance of Badger’s Drift to identify the ways in which the past has been idealised through architecture.

Throughout the novel there are certain occasions where characters declare the features of Badger’s Drift, which I argue have the illocutionary force of defining an English village.

I am referring specifically to the assertive class of illocutionary acts which John Searle describes as “Representatives. The point or purpose of the members of the representative

class is to commit the speaker (in varying degrees) to something's being the case, to the truth of the expressed proposition” (Searle 10). In this respect, the illocutionary force is carried within characters’ declarations about attributes of the village, which often confirm stereotypes and thus suggest that these attributes are true for all English villages. This aspect of the narrative constructs the image of Anderson’s “imagined community” as these stereotypes can be inferred as characteristic of Englishness if they are assumed true for all English villages.

In her first meeting with Inspector Barnaby, Miss Bellringer reveals a few subtle, but important characteristics of Badger’s Drift while she tries to explain why her friend’s death is suspicious:

“He came straight to me … he’s been our postman for years … knew us both and I telephoned Doctor Lessiter -”

“That’s your friend’s GP?”

“He’s everyone’s GP, Inspector. Well, all the elderly in the village and those without transport. Otherwise it’s a four-mile trip into Causton.” (Graham 16) In this passage, Miss Bellringer is able to establish the key features of Badger’s Drift;

firstly, its close social connectedness is established by the fact that she and her neighbour, Miss Simpson, knew the postman on a personal level, which reflects the stereotype that in a village everyone knows everyone. This notion is confirmed by Miss Bellringer’s declaration that Doctor Lessiter is everyone’s GP, even though she qualifies that statement to mean only the elderly and people without transport. However, the impact of this passage is that Badger’s Drift is portrayed as having a strong sense of community because it projects an imagined community where everyone is acquainted with each other. This speaks to the ONS survey which suggested that community spirit was lacking (Office for National Statistics 6) and highlights Matless’ acknowledgement that “the rural needs always to be understood in

terms relative to those of the city and suburb” (Matless 17). The illocutionary force of this passage is to suggest that in a village, individuals, such as a postman, are members of a community rather than anonymous agents within a community. It is within larger urban areas where the sheer number of inhabitants makes it impractical for everyone to know everyone, thus impersonal or anonymous interactions are a social norm, for example, not knowing your postman or having a different GP from your neighbours. I would suggest that this passage presents an idealised sense of community lost in contemporary urban and suburban communities. This is in line with Santesso’s claim that nostalgia idealises the past because the close-knit community of Badger’s Drift is an idealised community symbolic of the past.

This idea of a close-knit community is further emphasised when Miss Bellringer reveals to Inspector Barnaby that she is aware that a post-mortem has been carried out on her friend before this information has been made public. The legitimacy of a village

“grapevine” is acknowledged in the same passage as it is explained that Barnaby “had been brought up in a village not much larger than Badger’s Drift and knew how efficient the grapevine could be” (Graham 40). Barnaby is still surprised by the speed with which this news has been disseminated which creates the impression that this is some sort of village superpower. This is repeated in the TV series, albeit through the character of Dennis Rainbird when he arrives at the scene of the investigation to collect the body of Miss Simpson. He reveals his knowledge of details of Miss Simpson’s death which have not been made public, and when he is questioned about how he acquired this knowledge, he states

“Oh come on, everyone knows by now. It’s that sort of village” (Horowitz 10:16-10:19) This plays into the stereotype of the village as a small community with pervasive social connection and communication. This pervasiveness is suggested in the prologue by Miss Simpson; after she witnessed the two people fornicating in the forest, she knew that she could not tell anyone in the village: “she had lived in a small village long enough to know

that what she had discovered could safely be discussed with no one” (Graham 9). This information is presented as a fact about small villages, and evidenced by the vicar who was

“a terrible gossip, especially after the Wine Circle’s monthly get-together” (Graham 9) and her best friend, Lucy Bellringer, who, although not a gossiper, “had absolutely no idea of concealment” (Graham 9). These social connections and character assessments are a pastiche of village community as they are produced from the blank parody of stereotyped gossiping villagers.

Superstition is used in constructing the trope of the village; in Barnaby’s first interview with Miss Bellringer, he asks if she had entered the garden or shed, to which she replies she

“had to tell the bees” (Graham 48). She explains that this must be done when someone dies, especially if it is their owner. This is in fact a real tradition that was likely to have been most prominent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States and Western Europe. The practice involved notifying the bees of major events in the beekeeper’s life, such as a death or marriage, and failing to do so could lead to dire consequences (English).

However, this tradition has certainly fallen from mainstream culture, and Sergeant Troy’s response to this belief is emblematic of the scepticism towards such superstitions, “Clear orf is right, observed Troy to himself. Clear orf her rocker. He flexed his fingers, deciding to omit this unlikely bit of potted folklore” (Graham 48). However, Inspector Barnaby does not pass any statement or evaluation of this tradition, but only makes a curious enquiry “Really?”

This is significant because he is the character who has sharp perception and is able to solve the case, while Sergeant Troy is repeatedly shown to lack such perception and continually fails to see what Barnaby sees. In a way, Troy’s rejection of village folklore can be seen as legitimising it because he lacks an open mind to perceive its validity. Barnaby’s lack of criticism is a tacit acceptance of village folklore and its significance. I would argue that communicating with the bees is another example of how people in a village are suggested to

be more connected to nature, and whether or not bees behave any differently is not important, but rather that there is a sense of connection is of more significance. Because of Barnaby’s tacit acceptance of this superstition, we can infer that Troy simply does not understand this connection. It is the appreciation of this connection to nature that has been lost, and its inclusion in both the novel and TV series demonstrates folklore as a noteworthy component in the construction of the village trope.

Perhaps the most obvious aspect of the village trope is the physical appearance and descriptions of the village itself. After Barnaby makes his first visit to Doctor Lessiter, we are given a detailed description of Badger’s Drift. There are numerous references to historical periods; Doctor Lessiter’s house is “a splendid Victorian villa” (Graham 28), the main street had “a very large and beautiful Georgian house” (Graham 28), and the church was “thirteenth-century stone and flint” (Graham 28), which is contrasted by the church hall having “twentieth-century brick and corrugated iron” (Graham 28). It is notable that in the description of the village, only the Victorian villa and the Georgian house have positive adjectives (“splendid” and “beautiful”), while other features of the village, associated with being modern, are bare of any adjectives at all:

The cross bar, called simply the Street, had a crescent of breeze-block council houses, a few private dwellings, the Black Boy pub, a phone box, and a very large and beautiful Georgian house. […] The post office was a up two-down, no doubt suitably fortified, called Izercummin, which doubled as the village shop. (Graham 28)

As can be seen in this passage, the Georgian house has an elevated status compared to the other features of the village. The council houses have been described by their breeze-block construction, which is characteristic of industrial, large-scale, and cheap construction and lacks any association with aesthetic appeal. Like the church hall, the council houses

demonstrate a lost sense of architectural charm, and note that the period of their design is not defined by a reigning monarch (such as Georgian or Victorian). I would argue that the named periods are part of the nostalgic construction of Englishness, pointing to periods of

“splendid” and “beautiful” architecture, (in which we can include the thirteenth century church as this period saw the rise of English Gothic architecture and is contrasted by the contemporary brick and corrugated iron), while the twentieth century is associated with cheap functional materials that suggest a loss of aesthetic endeavour. In so doing, there is a contrast between an idealised past that provided an aesthetically pleasing village landscape compared to the bleakness of function driven contemporary architecture.

It is worth pointing out that in the TV series, “Very often the whole village set-up has to be fabricated to fit the story line” (Evans 47), which means that the production might film in locations from several different villages but edit them together so that they look like one village. While there are practical reasons for doing so, it nonetheless allows for a seamless pastiche of village aesthetics to construct an idealised village landscape. This means that they can choose signifiers of a rural landscape, such as a church with a particular style of architecture from one village, and edit it with other rural signifiers, such as a street with another or same style architecture, to construct an imagined landscape. Importantly, this means that they can edit out parts of a village, such as buildings with contemporary architecture, that do not conform to an idealised image of a village and thus mythologise the English village as a nostalgic escape from the present. The appeal of this escape is evidenced by Buckinghamshire’s website: with a page dedicated to the fictional county and headed

“Visit Midsomer”, it offers tours of filming locations, and places to eat and stay in

“Midsomer” (Visit Buckinghamshire).

The pub is a quintessential element of any English village, as traditionally it was the social centre of the village. The village pub in Badger’s Drift is named The Black Boy which

has some subtle historical connotations. This is a common name for pubs in the United Kingdom, and while the origins for the name is uncertain, with some claiming it refers to child chimneysweeps or coal miners, others claim the name is linked to King Charles II (Jolly), who was “nicknamed the Black Boy because his mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, was ashamed of his dark and swarthy appearance” (BBC 38). He is historically notable because his coronation restored the monarchy after the English civil war. He was in exile when his father, King Charles I, was overthrown and executed, but was invited to return to England as king following the death of Oliver Cromwell, who had led the Civil war and ruled the British Isles as the Lord Protector. This reference has a very clear association with restoration and is correlated with Boym’s notion of restorative nostalgia which “engage[s]

in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths” (Boym 41). The Black Boy pub thus represents the restoration of a nostalgic Englishness through the symbolism of Charles II returning to the throne and restoring the monarchy. This is also an example of Smith’s suggestion that through the use of symbols, community members are “reminded of their common heritage and cultural kinship and feel strengthened and excited by their sense of common identity and belonging” (Smith 17).

The restoration of harmony is another feature of The Killings at Badger’s Drift, and the series more generally. The series is called the Midsomer Murders because there is murder in every episode, which begs the question as to why such a heinous crime needs to be continually repeated. I would suggest that the reason lies in its ability to restore the harmony of the community. In effect, the murders are a pastiche, a blank parody of killing another person, and are simply a means of instigating social disharmony in order to restore it. To understand this point, consider that the murder of Miss Simpson differs between the novel and the TV series. In the novel, she is poisoned with hemlock, while in the TV series she is bludgeoned to death. These are very different ways of killing someone and could reveal very

different characteristics of the murderer and their intent. However, I would contend that the method of killing is simply an “image” of murder, to use Jameson’s terminology, as the act of murder is in fact a repetition of social disharmony, and not a true reflection of human actions. Murder compels an investigation of the intimate connections of people to uncover the disharmony, thus murder is a pretext for exploring society and community. If we accept the premise that the series seeks to restore a nostalgic sense of Englishness found in village communities, then we can see how the pastiche of murder allows the series to continually repeat a cathartic restoral of village harmony.

This section has examined the ways in which Badger’s Drift can be understood as a literary trope and how it defines an imagined community that is more broadly emblematic of all English villages. Along with an idealised community, Badger’s Drift establishes the village trope by employing superstition to link village life with more connectedness to nature and using architecture to contrast the bleakness of the present with an idealised past. I have identified Badger’s Drift as a pastiche with easily identifiable symbols and stereotypes that construct the village as a nostalgic trope. I have also described murder as a pastiche which is employed in the series to precipitate social disharmony as a pretext for intimately exploring the village society and community in order to cathartically restore the harmony.